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“... One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a 34-year-old Alan Hollinghurst. It was an extraordinary portrait, the two absolutely at ease but sitting at an angle to each other and looking quizzical. Hollinghurst, clean-shaven and gentle. Wyndham, melancholy and long-cheeked. Intimate but formal. Possibly plotting. One ...”

“... was always at the heart of the LRB. He designed the first issue in October 1979 – a 28-page insert inside European editions of the New York Review; redesigned it six months later after the papers’ divorce; and in 1997 re-redesigned it. But saying that gives no sense of his importance to the paper. As much as the original editors and the ...”

“... Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that ...”

“... said Hopkins. ‘It’s more of an account book.’ It was divided into columns across the page, each column numbered, possibly indicating a week or a month, the broad left-hand column a list of initials, and in the other columns figures, possibly amounts. The figures were closely packed and as neat as the work of a professional accountant. ‘Can you ...”

“... 1909, turned it on its head in every sense, and wrote in it from the other end, marking his first page ‘PRIVATE’. Forty-seven years later it was showing ‘signs of wear in the binding and of recalcitrancy in the lock’, and as time ran on, he started to wonder if the lock was really necessary. ‘The older one grows, the less one values secrecy ...”

“... One is John von Neumann, whose team built the first electronic digital computer. The other was Alan Turing, who pioneered the logical theory of computation. It would be quite wrong to characterise the one man as applied, the other as pure. Turing was fascinated by all sorts of mechanical and electrical computational devices, while von Neumann was a ...”

“... first encounter with the composer of whom his family had ever been talking lends the first page of his memoir a dramatic power of surprise. Strolling in Vienna on an August afternoon in 1825, the 12-year-old boy and his father notice a man walking alone, heading straight towards us ... He was powerful looking, of medium height, vigorous in his gait ...”

“... in the Guardian can be sad. ‘The office as a playground is back in fashion,’ one recent front-page story says. ‘The midwives were caring, fulfilled and passionate,’ a young journalist writes about her decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ...”

“... as you want it to be. Lighten up, he repeatedly tells sad celebrities who complain about his front page exposés that result in their unemployment or divorce. Take it easy, he emails spin doctors and government ministers who fear for their majorities after he has trashed their policies or their love lives to two million readers of the Mirror. I can see that if ...”

“... tomatoes and Siamese carrots ... An unbelievably busy market. Yet just across the road, and page, in ‘Ibrahim’s Café’, Boyle contrives a totally convincing surrealist interior, accurate and obscure, under the flickering eye of a TV screen. Sleeping rough is always evocative when dealing with closed spaces marked by human activity. William ...”

“... through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin ...”

“... on the manuscript that would become In Patagonia: ‘pages of outstanding prose’; ‘very much a page-by-page read’; ‘I don’t feel able to dismiss it’ but ‘I don’t think it’s on as it stands.’ She ends by recommending an ‘investigation of the author’s position’ – which is pretty much what she ...”

“... in which you are allowed with impunity to give away the endings of whodunnits. We are told on page 248 who strangled Sally in James’s Cover Her Face (it wasn’t, of course, the loyal housekeeper), and a page later Priestman coolly lets the murderer of A Certain Justice out of the bag. If this kind of thing catches ...”

“... themselves, so that one’s whole life and all the people in it, was pressed out, bloodless on the page, and all the love was betrayed.’ The quality of this doubt should be respected: but Clare Boylan’s themes, love and its betrayal, are faithfully served by her exactitude. As in her novel (motifs from which recur), her attention to the language of and ...”

“... words – after the murder. In The Blue Dahlia, the net closes in on the returning veteran, Alan Ladd, suspected of killing the wife who betrayed him while he was at war. The murderer in Chandler’s script was the William Bendix character, Ladd’s war buddy, an amnesiac killer suffering from blackouts: playing Smerdyakov to ...”